


watch and listen

by saturnsage



Category: Fallen Hero Series - Malin Rydén
Genre: M/M, survivor's guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-01
Updated: 2019-04-01
Packaged: 2019-12-30 04:32:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18308249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saturnsage/pseuds/saturnsage
Summary: because you loved him so much it still makes you sorry.





	watch and listen

**Author's Note:**

> listen i KNOW this is weird when i finally get my timeline accurate you bet your ass im deleting this

This and this first: when he hears his footsteps echoing in the hallway, with the very tiles he steps on threatening to bite down on his feet, he attempts to make himself smaller. The clicking of the empty barrel of the gun, that’s all is left of him.   
  
As he walks, he sees some metallic contraption thick enough to wrap his hand around and the size of a bat, and he thinks about slamming it down on his legs, just to leave a mark. Scathe his body just like the rest of them. Leave dented marks on his body so he can know that he didn’t cheat.   
  
It’s a new feeling to hate the sound of his own feet, to see the smooth steel of his prosthetic legs and want them as mangled as his thoughts, but death does strange things to those who’ve kissed it.

He does not count himself lucky to have survived. A doctor with a white coat spots him, he thinks, and he can barely hear what they say. All he thinks is how to find something that’ll leave enough of a scar on the rebuilt parts of him.   
  
“Sir? You’re not supposed to be out and about,” They say, keeping their voice low, and their eyebrows pinched.  
  
He doesn’t answer. They thin their mouth.  
  
“Are you in need of something?”  They ask.   
  
Did the room somehow hurt him too? Did it see that he couldn’t feel the same as everyone else does, and decided to make him hurt in a more physical sense? Not just think, but see and feel and listen and  _watch. Watched.  
  
_ (It could have been a mind-trick. It could have been an illusion. It couldn’t have been real.)  
  
“Where is he?”   
  
“Excuse me sir, who?”   
  
“Jie-Sun. Sidestep. Where is he? I. I need to make sure he’s okay. Please.”(It was probably something that happened between the lids of his eyes. Where the purple of closed eyes are, that’s where it showed. He watched something that didn’t happen.)  
  
Their hand is on his shoulder. It’s not comforting. It’s too heavy, and he swallows in order to stop himself from throwing the hand off. He could grab it and break the wrist. He could find something in this room and start to swing. He could make his shoulder ring and watch as they snatch the hand back with the bolts still dancing on their palm.   
  
He doesn’t.   
  
The doctor sighs, and their face falls. “Sir,” They whisper. “Why don’t you go back to your rooms? You’re still shocked from the explosion.”  
  
“No. No. I need him. Where? Which room?” The voice that comes from his mouth sounds choked. It sounds like the end of a war, like those girls in the movies whose sweethearts never came back, It sounds the same as his footsteps: the clicking of a gun with no bullets. He wants to shove in his mouth from his throat and rip it out, throw it across the room.   
  
He needs to make sure. What he wouldn’t do the rips the walls off this hospital until it’s nothing but exoskeleton, until he’s making sure that Sidestep is alive, alive, alive. He’ll apologize. He’ll never stop saying sorry. He’ll kiss their mouths into something safe, cradle the face loved.   
  
The doctor gently pushes him to the wrong side of the hallway. They don’t look at him as they say something, muffled under a fishbowl. “I’m sorry. There was nothing we could do. I’m so sorry.”   
  
This and this first: there’s a certain kind of punishment for surviving past your death date. A shrink will call it survivor’s guilt, but it’s nothing that simple.   
  
It’s the sinking of your tongue. It’s the burn of your throat as you try to remember why it’s so important to breathe. It’s the looseness of your arms as they shake off the skin, it’s the aching of your back bending so low it breaks in two. It’s that feeling that you should have died, but you didn’t, because some God or some error in the uncaring universe decided that you shouldn’t. It’s the second shoe dropping on all your new-old wounds.  
  
He thinks he’s crying. He think he’s running hands through hair and hoping it rips. Maybe he’s being led back to the room, or maybe he isn’t. He thinks about going back to that building.  
  
He thinks.   
  
(He didn’t think. He  _watched._ )  
_______  
  
This and this first: he never  _had_  Sidestep. Not really. He had his anger, his sadness, and his hope, because that’s the only three parts of him that he ever showed. Jie-Sun, threatening the streets, threatening the sun, beating criminals with his fists so tight that he broke his thumbs. Jie-Sun, crying into Ricardo’s shoulders and tucking his face into Ricardo’s neck, letting himself being held and being listened to. (Only at night, only when it was too dark to see his face, only when Jie-Sun could pretend it was a dream and not the real thing.) Jie-Sun, laughing into a kiss that Ricardo stole and kept stealing, grinning when their hands tangled for one second longer than before.   
  
He never had Sidestep. Ricardo knows very well that he kept pushing Sidestep into a locker, something to open when no one’s watching.   
  
They gave him permission to open up Sidestep’s locker and clear everything out. Anathema’s family came by and took all of her belongings, with bowed heads and teary smiles and the ‘we could never blame you for what happened’ and the ‘we were so proud of her’.   
  
Wei is still in the hospital. Something about how they found him feverish and toying with the wiring on his shoulder made them worried about wether or not therapy was helping him.In the locker there’s only a few coats, some unwrapped sweets. There’s a tiny box the size of a ring box, and when Ricardo opens it, there’s three pairs of earrings.   
  
It’s almost nothing. That’s what their thing was.  _Almost something. Not quite nothing._  
  
Ricardo takes the coats and earrings home, and pretends like he doesn’t want to try them on, see if they’re still warm from touching Jie-Sun’s skin. He rubs his ear-lobe, and thinks of coming out of all of this marked after all. A small piercing. A tiny un-welding wound. Wearing the ghosts right under his ear, because he survived by not hearing what his ugly fears had to say.   
  
(He heard other things, though. He still hears them.)  
  
____  
  
A lightning bolt is the hottest thing that can ever hurt someone. It’s supposed to be thin and sharp and contained, it’s supposed to hit you once, and then never again.   
  
That’s what his anger is supposed to be. His dad told him something about not being able to afford tantrums, since tantrums belong to the people, not to him.   
  
This isn’t a tantrum. This isn’t thin and sharp and a fast strike. He wakes up in the middle of the night remembering the color of Jie-Sun’s breaths under a cold night, and punches the mirror in his bedroom until the glass sticks to his knuckles.   
  
And then he swallows the buzzing that wants to get out in, because if he let it go, it’d be a tantrum. It wouldn’t be a lightning bolt, it’d be a natural disaster. Instead of kicking the TV into shards, he lets the electricity buzz in his teeth, under the roof of his mouth, and doesn’t scream.  
  
____  
  
God, does he want to scream.   
  
____  
  
The funeral does nothing but make him feel disgusted, and he spends it wishing it was over, that they wouldn’t draw it out, that he could paw at the ground with the soles of his shoes without the entire country watching him.   
  
Marshal Charge, lost one of his team and lost his sidekick.   
  
(Sidekick. It makes him sick to the stomach.  _Sidekick._ )   
  
Everyone wants this to be just like in the movies, because Los Diablos is Hollywood blockbuster incarnated, because although people died, at least it was flashy, at least it wasn’t them.   
  
The buttons are polished to a shine, and his curls shine with the gel he put on earlier this morning. When he comes out, the speech they wrote for him is just as polished as a new car, and every two minutes he has to lean out of the microphone to make sure they don’t catch him gasping for breath. Every-time they talk about Sidestep, and not Jie-Sun, it’s another knife-wound to his lungs, because who was Sidestep, really? Just another vigilante, just another statistic.   
  
He manages to get to the funny anecdotes part of the speech before it snaps, before it breaks, before it becomes a tantrum and  the tarp where he hid the electricity finally pops out. Because a funeral is like a toothache; you have to sit and squirm and  _think_  about everything  you lost, and why it’s hurting you so much.  
  
Marshal Charge, lost one of his team and lost his sidekick.   
  
(He was never a sidekick. Ricardo should have known what he really was. Fuck the cameras, fuck the press, fuck the journalists, fuck the news. It shouldn’t have mattered. He shouldn’t have hid it.)   
  
Marshall Ricardo Ortega Charge, palms pressed against his face and crying like a child, the microphones catching everything.   
  
___  
  
Chen carries him into the bunks and listens to the sobs that he keeps emitting, says “I know” to Ricardo saying he loved Sidestep so much that he couldn’t have loved anyone else before, and listens to every broken part of him until Ricardo falls asleep and dreams of hell.   
  
Because a death is like a regret. Because they both fought against this and both lost. Because Ricardo loved Jie-Sun so much it makes him sorry.   
  



End file.
